Assessing Innovation in Teaching: An Example Marian Petre Centre for Informatics Education Research - Part 2 Faculty of Mathematics and Computing Open University Milton Keynes MK7 6AA UK m.petre@open.ac.uk Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the June 1998 issue of SIGCSE Bulletin, described a large-scale evaluation project associated with a change of teaching practice: The Internet presentation of a distance-taught entry-level c o m p u t i n g course. It described the aims of our investigations: ¢ A practical examination of available technology, ¢ A well-founded comparison between Internet and conventional delivery, in terms of how well the technology fit into existing administrative structures, whether it would scale up (the OU teaches some 150,000 students per year), communication patterns and content associated with each style of delivery, comparative costs (including tutor time), quality and experience of problem and discussion sessions, student and tutor experiences of the courses, and effects on learning, ¢ A n examination of the impact which individual differences had on resource usage and on learning effects, in order to begin to untangle the factors contributing to any differences we might detect. Part 1 also described the rich data collection, .from tutors
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